To help encourage conversations and dialogue about listening, our topic/question for the dinner table is: How does the practice of listening help to improve your ability to learn? Making Room for Listening (Week of 10/5/20)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
The beautiful weather this weekend sure felt like a ‘vitamin boost’ - I know we are in desperate need of some rain, but I am enjoying the sun, light, and fresh air. The weeks seem to go by so quickly with what feels like ‘two Mondays and two Fridays’ (and I am sure other analogies apply as well), so we are trying to do our best to create and take advantage of quiet on the weekends. The boys had a few sports activities and we spent some time outside as much as we could.
On the way to one of Owen’s games this weekend, we (well, I think Owen half-listened as he was listening to music) listened to a recent episode from the Getting Smart Podcast with Tom Vander Ark interviewing Ed Hess. Hess is the author of Hyper-Learning: How to Adapt to the Speed of Change and the episode is well worth everyone’s time. We will be exploring and diving into some of Hess’s work at Blake - the messages, learning, and premises that Hess outlines directly align with our guiding lights, priority standards, learning skills, efforts to provide meaningful feedback, equity, and an authentic and relevant focus on learning rather than content. I have copied the link below to the episode, along with a few ‘notes’ - I believe that it is incumbent upon us as educators to truly reflect upon the science of learning and to actively respond for our students...
Ed Hess on Adapting to the Speed of Change
(33 minutes)
- Hyper learning - ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn
- Most of all learning comes from a ‘meaning making experience’
- Workshops, not case studies
- Humility is ‘the new smart’
- Need to listen and act on the ‘science of learning’
- We are all ‘sub-optimal’ learners; our system works to see what we believe - we need others to help us
- Intellectual humility - get curious about your learning
- We are not wired to be adaptive - we need to actively build the skill
- Need caring candor - not just candor
Listening and learning go ‘hand in hand’ and are dependent on one another. They can take different forms and I hope we can work on providing opportunities for students to listen and learn in a variety of forms and structures - hybrid, in person, remote, etc. The sampling of responses from last week’s Topic/Question along with the shared posts hopefully provide an opportunity for us to listen and learn...
Sampling of Responses from Our Last Topic/Question (Week of 9/28/20): What have you learned about yourself as a learner since the school year started?
- That students are stronger than we realize.
- It's hard to teach students while doing a lot of learning yourself. The number of technology tools out there is overwhelming. I don't know which ones are best and will have the most impact on my student learning. On top of that, I need to learn how to use and implement the new technology myself.
- Routines are crucial and it can be a challenge to establish new routines in our hybrid model. I have faith the further we get along in this, the more routine things will feel.
- I have learned that learning can take place anywhere at any time!
- I like being in school more than remote.
- That it’s okay to take a break and that I get stressed easily
- I try in most of my subjects but some of the work is too tedious.
- I learned that you just need to keep trying and always keep trying
- Since the school year started, I have noticed that I like learning MUCH better than online work/zooms. I find it more boring, harder to focus and just not as enjoyable as middle school should be when at home.
- I work well in calm spaces and with others.
- I learned that even when I get into a tricky situation and I don’t know how to solve something, I stop for a moment and tell myself that I can do it. This has helped me greatly, whenever I think that I can’t do something.
- That I know more than I think
- I haven’t learned much, but I definitely learned that I enjoy in-person school more.
- I learned that I work better in the morning.
- I have learned that I am a very visual learner and seeing things or doing things really help me understand.
- Math is my favorite class so far.
- I need a quiet space to work with minimal distractions.
- That if the work is hard I have to keep moving on.
- I love science
- I do well working at home, and school
- I learned that my teachers are very nice and kind
- I learned that I can learn differently
- I am forgetful and sometimes I forget to turn in my work
- I am getting used to the masks
- I prefer to be in school
- That it’s okay to take a break and that I get stressed easily
Educators, Get Prepared for a W-Shaped Recovery ... Emotional Not Economic
by Sean Slade in Education Week
Slade’s guest post provides an important structure for all educators to reflect upon as we aim to support all students and families this year. Within he outlines the ‘W-shaped Recovery’ that we will all be navigating - ‘an economic term that outlines how businesses and trade will likely not bounce back—such as in a V-shaped recovery—but rather have a series of peaks and troughs before we get back to what could be considered normal.’ It is clear that ‘being there’ for students and simply being present is important and is within our control.
I am not an economist, but I am an educator, and it is becoming clear that a similar issue will likely occur within our sector and amongst our students, staff, and families. Schools should start preparing themselves for what will very likely be a W-shaped recovery in terms of our emotional well-being and sense of security.
...it is very likely that we will be experiencing a W-shaped recovery, or even a multi-W-shaped recovery, as we navigate this year. Once this relief of return has evaporated in the air, many will be reflecting on how we have not returned to what was considered normal. These reactions may be as simple as This is not 'school' as I remember it, or I hope this isn't how it's going to be forever. For others it may be a growing realization that their homes or learning spaces are making real learning near impossible. Juggling siblings, family care, no or intermittent Wi-Fi, sharing devices, along with little or no access to support or counseling, will affect any learner's ability to learn.
The best answer we have is to be proactive and to build up our school and community's protective factors...Whether that be school, family, or the community, she found that focusing on caring relationships, along with meaningful participation, and high expectations, helped establish environments where youths felt safe, supported, and connected.
Given that we will be in this crisis in some form for at least the calendar year if not the school year, this is the time to refocus on those actions that connect us and protect us. We may have little control over the virus and its consequences, but we do have some control over our schools, classrooms, and relationships.
Being there was the underlying theme that echoed throughout all the Circle focus groups and all series of questions. Be there when students need help, be there when they need structure, be there when they need advice, be there when they need to be pushed, be there when they need guidance, be there when they need more space and time, and be there when something's wrong and they don't know what to do. "Being there" encapsulates a relationship, a friendship—someone who knows your name and knows "your story." It encompasses caring, and believing you will succeed. In its most simple form it consists of physically "being there"—being present and making time. (Benard & Slade, 2009)
Student Voices: What They Are Saying About Distance Learning
by Denise Pope in NAIS
Denise Pope’s voice and work at Challenge Success is clear in this post - pushing schools to listen to the experiences of students and to make some necessary changes. The insights gained from our period of ‘emergency remote learning’ and from our current ‘hybrid mode of learning’ are ones that should not be forgotten; rather, they should serve as drivers for important and necessary change.
Our findings related to distance learning are likely not new ideas to most educators—educational research has validated these points—but hearing them directly from students serves as an important opportunity for reflection. Students experienced challenges with the new learning environment—less support for time management/focusing, technology issues, and missing in-person interactions—but students also reported benefits and insights that can help educators best support students’ well-being, equity, and engagement with learning during this school year and beyond.
Making human connections
Finding the time
Building in more flexibility
Getting to the heart of lessons
Offering more student-selected, authentic learning experiences
School communities can embrace what they learn and use it to redesign and reimagine what they can offer students that best supports the journey to become balanced, healthy, and engaged learners—wherever that learning happens.
Grading to Encourage Re-Learning
By Bryan Goodwin and Kris Rouleau in Educational Leadership
This post gets at the essence of what feedback should be - a tool/practice to support learning, growth, and re-learning. They encourage and implore us to lean on and listen to the ‘science of learning’ to improve grading practices - an endeavor we are striving towards for our students.
You're not reading the first draft of this column. Or even a second or third. It's been reworked so many times, in fact, we have no idea which version you're now reading. That is as it should be. After all, there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. The same is true of learning. It seldom occurs as a one-time event. Rather, it's an iterative process that requires repetition, reflection, and re-learning. Traditional grading practices, though, often treat learning as a finite process. We reach the end of a unit, measure what students know, give them a grade, and move on.
Learning is really a matter of re-learning—adding new mental pathways to stored knowledge so we can retrieve that knowledge when needed. So, students are not mistaken when they miss items on a graded exam and exclaim, "But I knew that!" Yes, they had stored the knowledge, but had too few mental pathways to retrieve it during the fateful hour of the exam.
...employing grading practices that reflect the science of learning will have an added benefit for students, especially those who struggle: It will help them see themselves not as "bad" learners, but rather as needing to do what all "good" learners do: re-learn.
What Is Truly the Meaning Behind Words Like 'Disadvantaged' and 'Disengaged'?
by Peter DeWitt (@PeterMDeWitt) in Education Week
DeWitt’s post is an important one and worthy of both self and collective reflection. We use many descriptors in schools and it is critical that we take a hard look at the language we use. Once we take a look, we then need to adjust our language and take some concrete actions.
Over the last few months, the need to explore the words we use in school has taken a much more serious turn. Due to the need for conversations around racial unrest, white privilege, antiracism, discrimination, and institutional racism, I believe we need to explore the words we use, and the important context of those words, to a much deeper level.
The truth is, if white leaders do not feel comfortable starting anti-racist work, discussing and debating Black Lives Matter and police brutality because they deem those topics to be "controversial," then they will slacken their efforts to facilitate those conversations because either they don't care to support anti-racist work, may not know how to have the conversation, are concerned about pushback from white teachers and families in the community, or they may not feel as though they will get support from their district office or divisions.
If we really want to explore and change anti-racist attitudes and institutional racism, it's not just the big actions like zero-tolerance policies that we must deconstruct. We also have to look at the language we use and the implicit bias that comes with those words. Words like "disadvantaged" and "disengaged" too often put the onus on the student, and in some cases, blame the student, while the adult walks away without taking responsibility for using language and attitudes that may have created the disengagement in the first place.
As we listen and learn together, Julie Woodard’s (@woodard_julie) image/outline below serves as an excellent framework for growth and change - I particularly like her last ‘point’ - ‘Become the better version of you’...
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Take care.
Nat
#willfulhope #willfulaction #longasIcanseethelight